The big teams in Formula One were unable to cut out the middle man in Bahrain on Thursday as Sergio Pérez (Force India) and Valtteri Bottas (Williams) dominated the start of the third and final pre-season test.

Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari, the three leading teams last year, all had problems while Force India and Williams, normally dogged midfielders or even worse, had the best of the day.

It did help that most teams concentrated on race runs, rather than setting fast times. Pérez also used the softer, faster tyres to set his quickest lap and at the end of the session Bottas put in a quick run to promote himself to second place on the timesheets.

Red Bull, who have now managed just 176 laps in nine days of testing, had more problems. Daniel Ricciardo managed 39 laps on Thursday and for five hours the car was holed up in the garage with a lot of banging noises going on. Once again, overheating seemed to be the team's problem and the other Renault-powered marques – Lotus, Toro Rosso and Caterham – all continued to struggle beside those carrying Mercedes engines.

But Nico Rosberg also had troubles and Mercedes completed their session almost an hour early without explaining their problem. Ferrari had an electrical issue with Kimi Raikkonen's car in the morning and, though this was fixed, he came to a standstill on the track at the end of the day.

The difficulties at Lotus persist. This time they had problems with their new exhaust design and had to revert to an earlier configuration. And Caterham were unimpressive, with Kamui Kobayashi completing just 19 laps amid reliability concerns.

But it was a better day for Caterham's back-of-the-grid arch rivals Marussia, who had such a difficult time in Bahrain last week. They completed 44 laps, their best performance in testing so far, and their driver Max Chilton said: "It's great to finally achieve some reasonable mileage and also to have some consistency to our running once again. We have also had some positive signs in terms of reliability today, so all in all, I'm quite positive and we have a good basis now for the rest of the week."

The team principal, John Booth, added: "We are all very pleased that we have made such good progress today and achieved our target of being able to run the MR03 in high and low fuel specification. We are reasonably happy with the performance of the car and the reliability is also starting to come, although these are complicated cars and we are treading carefully."